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Fairplay Policy: The Battle Continues.

On all three servers.

Since the introduction of the Fair Play Policy, we’ve been working hard to create a fairer and more fun experience for everyone.

On SEA . Recently, 207 accounts were penalized for using illegal third-party modifications. 13 were repeat offenders and received permanent bans.

On EU Recently, 5 300 accounts were penalized for using illegal third-party modifications. 181 were repeat offenders and received permanent bans.

On NA Recently, 479 accounts were penalized for using illegal third-party modifications. 19 were repeat offenders and received permanent bans. Additional players are under investigation.

And with just the Stats.

On RU Recently, 33 087 – accounts were penalized for using illegal third-party modifications. 1618 – were repeat offenders and received permanent bans.

From the EU Portal.

Over the course of this last year, we’ve been working hard to take on your feedback to improve the very core of the game. One of the foremost concerns on your minds has been fair play and how it is often disturbed with modifications or any other unauthorized third-party software that provide those using them with unfair advantage in combat. These mods spoil the fun for the many of you who play the game fairly.

While we have quietly taken actions to defeat certain cheat mods over the past several months, we also realize that we haven’t set you straight on the list of modifications we view as cheats and the reasoning behind it. Nor have we been as consistent as we should in addressing instances of cheating.

So, today, we’re here to get things right:

We’ll continue to expand our work on anti-cheating technology solutions. We are being realistic about the problem: we can’t promise that the game will be 100% cheat free one day. Cheaters are clever and tackling them will go on forever. What we can promise you is that we will keep up the fight to keep competition as clean as possible, reduce the incidences of cheating, and take action against those who don’t play fair.

We’ve outlined a clear list of illegal mods that we will share with you here and now. Moving forward, we’ll be keeping an eye on new mods and update the list accordingly.

We’re also establishing a clear penalty system. It is uniform across all regions and applies to everyone found to be using prohibited software.

Players who are caught using forbidden mods for the first time, instead of earning their way in fair combat, will receive a warning and a suspension of 7 days. Should they get flagged again, they will be permanently banned. Before punishing a player, our team will review the case to ensure the discipline is merited. We’re asking you to trust in their decisions. They are under no obligation to provide the player evidence or explain which mod type the player was found to be using, and will not do so even if requested.

Which Modifications Will Be Penalized?

We know there are lots of mods out there, and we have already implemented a number of useful community mods into the game. However, some mods and software work against the community’s best interests. To be clear on what makes our naughty and nice list when we review third-party software, we divide them into three different categories:

Mods that do not provide a gameplay advantage, but merely allow information customization for the viewer. They are “pure” mods in the traditional sense, and we like them.

Mods that do provide a gameplay advantage, but one that we believe contributes to the game in a positive way. In the short term, we’ll treat these as good mods, and we will look to implement them into the vanilla client in the future.

Mods that do provide a gameplay advantage, one that we think is bad overall for the game. These are classified as a cheat and are illegal going forward.

Listed below are modifications that fall into this third category. Players that are found using them will receive a penalty.

Mods that reveal the position of enemies in a way not included in the vanilla client, by marking objects destroyed on the map and minimap in real-time, by altering the display of shell flight tracers or calculating the position of enemy SPGs with tracers and marking them, as well as those that keep spotted vehicles displayed, even when you aren’t aiming at them

Software that makes it easier to block an enemy’s shell by indicating their exact aiming point, for example, with a laser beam

Modifications that alert you when spotted vehicles are reloading or show enemy vehicles’ reloading timers

Auto-aim or so-called “aimbots” that provide more functionality than the “aim lock” in the vanilla client, specifically including those that aim at the enemy’s weak spots and/or lead the aim automatically so that a cheater can focus on maneuvering their tank

Software that enables the automatic use of non-Premium consumables

Mods that aid in finding enemies by letting you adjust the transparency of objects on the map

Software that leaves “ghosts” of enemy vehicles on the battlefield, placed where they were last detected

Mods that actually alter the physical properties, performance characteristics, or effects of any vehicle or object in the game, or subvert the game rules.

One final category: in-match armor viewer

We believe that this functionality provides a significant advantage. Since we didn’t treat it as a cheat in the past, we are not adding it to the Forbidden Mods List for now. Instead, we are working on our own version of an in-match viewer that will feature a functionality beneficial to the game. Once introduced, mods that offer additional in-match armor critical zone viewing will be added to the List.

Please also note that this applies to in-match viewers only. The mods that some of you have, which only work in the Garage (not during the match itself) are great. To us, they’re not cheating. In fact, we think in-Garage viewers are a really helpful tool that help newer players up their knowledge, and learn to fight better with or against different tanks. It’s only the ones that provide extra information in-match that we don’t think are fair and will be affected by our Fair Play policy.

well, you need to look at the number of active players on each server, but not only are the number of cheaters caught highest on the RU server, the % of the population there was also cheating much more than the other servers, followed by EU then NA.

Get rid of mods and the game interface will stagnate. Without mods to emulate the devs would still have us 3-4 major updates behind where we are now. What new interface features have NOT originated in mods? Mod are free development & playtesting for WG.

To me, it doesn’t make sense that NA has less people using illegal mods but I think the percentage of players that WG decided penalize was based on the population of the sever.

EU and RU have much larger population, so they have room to punish as many players as they detected from using illegal mods.

On the other hand, there are less 2.5K players daily in NA and SEA, if they banned 5K players like what EU has done, it is going to be a problem. Less population, worse matchmaking, longer queue, those issues are much serious than illegal mods in reality.

Or maybe, and I might be going out on a limb here, it’s just that the amount of people who use cheats is roughly the same percentage of the server population in each region. Thus lower server populations mean fewer cheaters, though still more or less the same ratio.

“They are under no obligation to provide the player evidence or explain which mod type the player was found to be using, and will not do so even if requested”.

While punishing cheaters is a welcomed initiative, this attitude is not. It might even infringe customer rights. It’s no secret that Wargaming managers have the mentality of post-soviet “wild wild capitalism” era thugs. But WGEU office should at least be familiar with the fact that there are laws in EU. I’m pretty sure they are counting on one willing to waste time and money to legally challenge their actions. It’s “just a video game account” after all.

That’s something they want to implement themselves. ( albeit not as a an ugly stupid skin. ) So it’s not forbidden for now. It also doesn’t give any information that the player couldn’t know themselves.

TBH that mod is pretty much useless.
When I started my WoT carreer in 2011 the clown skins where much more popular than today. But the average distance to your target makes those skins as good as useless. I tried it myself and all I got out of it were ugly t0nk models.

The saga of fair play continues. It’s easy to see SEA does not really care to stop the cheaters. But then most of the most well known cheaters are the top clans, (funny how that works) and Tanitha would never infringe on the people that cary the party line.

I still don’t understand how they find out who cheats. If you have illegal mods but you are smart and don’t abuse them in an obvious way, there is no way they can distinguish between a very skilled player and a cheater. Just my 2 cents.

“Software that leaves “ghosts” of enemy vehicles on the battlefield, placed where they were last detected”
Please, can somebody tell me how this can be a cheat/banned mod? Because i think this is a part of vanilla client…so if i play without mods theoreticly i am cheating too, right?

they arent talking about a ghost on the map, but a ghost on the battlefield itself where the tank model was, basicly if the tank dissapears it gives a grey tank model on the spto it dissaperead on the battlefield in 3D, not on the map.

To expand on the above: actual physical representations on the playing field make aiming much, much easier, since getting the exact position and especially the range (from your effectively 2d first-person view) right just based on the minimap icon is usually not the easiest thing in the world unless it’s obvious (e.g. player camped in a bush).

I was just thinking the other day of how nice such a mod would be to have, but didn’t go look it up because I knew it would be considered a form of cheating. It’s a clear gameplay advantage.

Most of these are clear enough. Although, a couple of these benefit from a second read. The one that caught my attentions was:

> “Mods that actually alter the physical properties, performance characteristics, or effects of any vehicle or object in the game, or subvert the game rules.”

Now, they may just be saying this as CYA, but I would hope that all critical calculations are checked server side. I had understood that this was how WG designed it. If so, this really shouldn’t be possible. If not shame on WG.

So putting aside game bugs such as where visual models of objects differ from the in game “reality” , this cheat sounds like changing tank parameters. I’m thinking a 50 kph Maus or shooting through the middle of non-destructible buildings/rocks/etc. The kind of thing that should be #1 on WG’s hit list.

As an example of an implementation bug, there are a couple of spots where the visual and hard edge of rocks are not quite aligned but it’s a pretty minor variance. Also it’s obvious.

As an example of a design “bug”/feature, as I understand it shells in flight have no caliber. The caliber only is realized when the center of the trajectory “hits” an object. So it’s possible to shoot large shells through small gaps in walls or between the turret and deck of a tank.

WG has said that they don’t have any plans to fix the “feature” of in-flight shells not having a caliber; it’s less intensive on the server and more intuitive for the player to treat shells as a single point in 3d space. So it’s not really even a bug, it’s more of a “this is how the engine functions and it would be more trouble than it’s worth to ‘fix’ it”.

Anyway.
As far as I know everything important is handled serverside, which is why playing with above ~60ms of latency becomes increasingly uncomfortable; steering inputs, firing, aiming, sight calculations etc etc are done on their end, using their (effectively untouchable) data files. The only point I can see in messing with the clientside tank XMLs is to produce different results in the garage stats and any programs (e.g. Tank Inspector or whatever’s in use these days) that depend on them. Seems pointless, really, unless you really want to display your Maus as capable of 50kph :v

I doubt they wrote that based on any such mod currently existing, more of an affirmation that “if you’re caught even attempting to screw with server operations, we’ll axe your account”.